Glass Cockpit
The part of the project I am working on now is to make an EFIS (Electronic Flight Instrument System). This consists of 4 units, a display, a display computer, an ADAHRS (Air Data, Attitude, and Heading Reference System), and a magnetic compass. They are connected by a bus. I will be able to attach 2 buses to the display computer for redundancy. A diagram of the system is below.
........... ........... ........... ........... . . . Display . . . . . . Display .<....>. . . ADAHRS . . Compass . . . . Comp . . . . . ........... ........... ........... ........... . . . . . . . . CAN Bus A . . . . ........................o.............o..................o...... . ...................o..................o..................o...... CAN Bus B . . . . . . ........... ........... . . . . . ADAHRS . . Compass . . . . . ........... ...........
Display
The display is mounted on the instrument panel and will also have buttons for input to the display computer. I got a small 5" monitor off of the mp3car site. This unit has a separate power supply box so is kind of complicated. It also has a touchscreen, which I probably won't use.
Display Computer
The display computer drives the display and also connects to the busses to read the data supplied by the sensor boxes.
- ARM CPU for low power
- USB port
- Linux OS
- Dual CAN controllers and connectors
- 12V Power supply
ADAHRS
The air data, attitude, heading reference system senses and encodes onto the bus the following data:
- Pitch, Pitch Rate, Pitch Acceleration
- Roll, Roll Rate, Roll Acceleration
- Yaw, Yaw Rate, Yaw Acceleration
- Total air pressure and Temperature
- Static air pressure and Temperature
- Angle of attack air pressure and Temperature
Compass
This one is simple, provide 3-axis magnetic field strength sensor data so that magnetic heading can be calculated. Encodes the data onto the bus.
DetailsTools
- Schematics - gschem
- Circuit Board Layout - pcb
- Gerber Viewer - gerbv
- Soldering
- USBTiny for AVR firmware programming
- Oscilloscope - Nano V2
- Embedded Software
- Angstrom distribution for display processor
- GCC for both display computer and 8-bit AVR's
- GNU Make and qmake for project builds
- git and Github for software configuration management
- Qt for graphics display
- avrdude to download firmware to boards